Many conversations at once

A flow drives several agents, and each of them holds as many conversations as it likes — a Ralph loop opens one a turn, a fan-out holds one per worktree. All of them written down the same screen is none of them readable.

So the transcript is one conversation, and tab and shift+tab step between them.

The keys


tab	The next agent that is working, and its conversation.
shift+tab	The one before it. Both wrap.

They step between the ones that are working. With ten agents going, what you step between is the ones thinking right now, not the ones that have stopped. A conversation between its turns is still read once you are on it — what you are reading stays put until you press one of these — but it is not stepped onto. With nothing working at all, both keys do nothing.

What "the conversation you are reading" decides

What the transcript shows. Moving writes a line saying which one is being read from there down, and draws what it has said under that.
Where a line you type goes.
What the line above the editor marks as 2 of 5.

   builder · claude/claude-opus-5:max · ● 2 of 5
   reviewer · codex/gpt-5.6-sol:high · ○ 1 · unread

● is an agent with a turn open, ○ one that has stopped. unread marks an agent holding a conversation that has said something since you last looked at it — so a flow of ten conversations is not nine nobody knows to look at.

Nothing is taken off the screen

Moving to another conversation carries on under the line saying so, and so does a conversation ending under you — a Ralph loop drops one a turn, and the line then says that conversation has gone. Only /clear clears.

What is being read is held by the conversation itself, not by where it comes in the list. The list churns. When the one you were reading goes, the newest of that agent's is read instead — since a loop that dropped one has already opened the next — and where that agent has none left, whatever is nearest to where it was.

What is kept is bounded, a flow being a thing that runs for days: the last eight conversations, and the last two thousand lines of each. Older lines and older conversations are gone from the screen, not from the trace.

Where the conversations come from

In the flow. Every one of these is a session, and the flow decides how many:

python

agent("do the task")                     # a conversation of its own, dropped straight after
session = agent.new()                    # one held across turns
sessions = agent.batch_new(200)          # two hundred that have not started
held = [agent.new(tree) for tree in trees]   # one per worktree

A session costs nothing until a turn lands in one. See Worktrees for the several-directories case, and Concepts › Session for why this is the single most important choice a flow makes.

Two things this is not

Not the person. A flow that talks to you is talking to you here, so the conversation with the person is not one of the ones these keys move between.

Not agents. Two agents at one model and effort are two agents, each with its own conversations. tab steps between conversations of agents that are working, which usually amounts to stepping between agents — but a fan-out is one agent and many conversations.

Many conversations at once ​

The keys ​

What "the conversation you are reading" decides ​

Nothing is taken off the screen ​

Where the conversations come from ​

Two things this is not ​

See also ​